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Resilient Web Systems with CSS & Sass

Miriam Suzanne
Your instructor
Miriam Suzanne
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Workshop includes:

  • Snacks and drinks
  • Tea and Coffee
  • Lunch
  • Paper and pen/pencil

Full-day workshop • Monday, October 12th
From building beautiful sites to maintaining complex design systems across multiple applications, CSS is the web-language of design.

Join Miriam for a deep-dive into the heart of CSS: how it works, what makes it special, and how we can harness it for resilient and maintainable design systems that scale. Rather than learning a single convention or toolkit, you’ll learn the fundamentals that all conventions share – how to think with CSS, and make smart decisions for your own project.


Since it was first proposed in 1994, CSS has attempted to solve two important problems:

  • How can we design with systems that keep our work consistent, performant, and maintainable?
  • How can we design with resilience across a wide range of interfaces – past, present, and future?

Now we’re building full mobile and desktop-style applications on the web, and those core CSS questions are more essential than ever. We need systems that scale, with resilience across an ever-growing range of bowsers and devices. Can we write CSS that’s up to the task?

Together, we’ll explore:

  • Why CSS works the way it does: from cascade and inheritance to normal flow and formatting contexts
  • Modern and “intrinsic” web layout in-depth: putting flexbox, grid, floats, alignment, writing modes, media queries and display in context
  • Moving past “browser support” to write modern and resilient CSS everywhere, without duplicating your efforts and driving up budgets
  • CSS architectures at the foundation of every naming convention, from OOCSS to BEM and ITCSS and beyond
  • Building meaningful and maintainable design systems with modern CSS and Sass
  • Integrating documentation and cross-team communication
  • What’s new in both CSS and Sass, and how you can get involved in where they go next

What prerequisites skills do you need?

The workshop is intended for professional front-end developers with experience in HTML and CSS.

What hardware/software do you need?

Bring your own laptop, your favorite text editor, and any practical CSS issues you’re facing.

About Miriam Suzanne

Miriam is a co-founder at OddBird, with 15 years experience as a project manager, user-experience designer, and front-end architect.

She is the creator of Susy, a core contributor to Sass, author of SitePoint’s Jump Start Sass, staff-writer for CSS Tricks, and teacher for the Mozilla Developer channel.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will take place the day before SmashingConf at a location to be decided. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Monday, October 12th.

Schedule for Monday, October 12th

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:30 PM – The End

Save 100 USD when signing up for the conference and a workshop!